We Happy Few
by Guerrie
Summary: AU. Xover with Supernatural. In '98, Harry Potter destroyed Voldemort, and then left England behind him. He thought it was over. Now, ten years later, Voldemort's back, and Harry's story has only just begun. Slash.
1. Prologue: Hunter

**WE HAPPY FEW**

_**Disclaimer:** All things Harry Potter belong to J. K. Rowling. All things Supernatural belong to Eric Kripke. _

_**Rating:** R (or the equivalent). Just to be safe. If you've read it in it's entirety and don't believe it's deserving of the rating, let me know and I'll consider changing it. I'm absolutely horrible at rating stories and could probably use all the help I can get. _

_**Full Summary:** Xover with Supernatural (the TV show). AU. In the June of '98, Harry Potter destroyed the Dark Lord Voldemort…and disappeared. Now, ten years later, Voldemort's back. And Harry's no where to be seen. _

_On the other side of the pond, Harry James Potter is paying his way as a fast becoming legendary Hunter, and going by any name but his own. He hadn't planned on returning to England ever, never mind within the week. He hadn't planned on his homecoming being to a post-apocalyptic world straight out of Dante's Divine Comedy. And it certainly hadn't been expected that he'd fall in love…with the most unlikely of people. Slash_

_**Timeline:** Set ten years after Harry's seventh year - though, at the time of conception, the seventh book had yet to be released and so isn't included - and midway through the second season of Supernatural. I've played fast and loose with events in the Harry Potter world - some happened, some didn't. In short: most of the sixth book has been blithely ignored unless otherwise stated, and the ending of OotP was notably different in that Sirius went toppling backwards a few feet to the left instead and missed the veil.  
_

_**PROLOGUE: HUNTER**_

"_From this day to the ending of the world, _

_But we in it shall be remember'd; _

_We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; _

_For he today that sheds his blood with me_

_Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, _

_This day shall gentle his condition: _

_And gentlemen in England now abed _

_Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, _

_And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks _

_That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day."_

_-- The St. Crispin Day Speech_.

**April 5th 2007**

His nose was broken.

Cursing, he pressed the knuckle of his thumb against it to try and stem the bleeding. It didn't work; the blood leaked through his fingers, dripping to the floor in Gryffindor red. He hissed under his breath, hand darting out to scuff the blood into the dirt floor.

Too late. The creature howled somewhere back and to his right. It was a preternatural sound - something which had never been human and would never be mistaken for it. But the form breaking away from the shadowed wall, it's nose in the air as it sniffed out his blood, could have been.

He watched it through a hole in the plasterboard, his back pressed up against the wall and his head ducked so his eyes were level with the gap. There was a gun in his hand, a Wilson KZ 45, but it wouldn't do much good, even if he just tried to use it to bash the thing's head in. He was an idiot. A bloody idiotic, unprepared dead man walking.

His breath sounded impossibly loud in the abandoned, rundown old hotel, only rivalled by his pounding heart beat and the scuff of the creature's feet on the dirt - the old panelled wood floor boards had been ripped out years ago. Cringing, he pressed himself back flat against the wall, hand still gingerly clutching his nose.

He was in what had once been the kitchen. It was industrial size, with an eclectic mix of wooden cabinet and stainless steel cupboards. More than one cupboard door was hanging loosely from one hinge. His eyes zeroed in on the selection of knives.

Now what were the chances that those were silver?

Unlikely, he decided. What kind of person had silver bread knives? A very special, paranoid person who probably wouldn't be working as a chef in a hotel. Or on a U.S. Navy battleship, come to think of it. But Casey Ryback was the exception, not the rule. And also not real. Darn it.

Snorting to himself, he eased himself up and away from the wall, keeping one ear pricked for the creature's progress down the corridor. Schurnf, schurnf, schurnf. It should have been funny. It was getting closer every second, though, so he wasn't laughing. He hesitated, eyeing the darkened patch of dirt where his blood had fallen. His nose had stopped bleeding, though he didn't dare breathe through it yet, but the blood on the floor would attract the thing's attention no matter how much dirt he tried to heap on it.

Merlin, but sometimes he missed scouring spells.

Shaking his head, he crept forwards across the kitchen. The cabinets were set up in rows, with corridors of empty space splitting them. He ducked into the first one and breathed a little easier now that there was more space between him and the creature. He locked his eyes on the hole in the wall opposite where once had hung a door - it had to be nearly there, surely - and slowly - slowly - reached up, feeling his way towards the knives by touch.

Nearly…just a little more…

His heart was thumping in his chest like it was trying to burst out of his ribcage and do the escaping itself, and he swallowed. His mouth was dry, like the Sahara in the midst of baking summer - parched and raw and grating and--there!

His fingers skidded over room temperature metal and he hissed, stretching just a little more - handle, handle, c'mon, han--

The wall behind him imploded. Dust and chunks of plasterboard pounded out a staccato beat as they flew into the room and landed around him. He ducked his head, shielding the back of his skull with a hastily thrust out forearm. Just in the nick of time, too; something heavy and sharp - torn ragged, really - slammed into his arm, and he had to choke back a pained cry. He couldn't tell whether the heat in his arm was blood coating his skin or a side affect of the pain.

Something else caught the back of his knee and he went down, only Seeker quick reflexes saving him from landing flat on his face. He overcompensated, jerking to the side, and the crown of his head hit the cabinet next to him with a deafening thud and a blinding flare of pain. He hissed, but the world didn't fade to black.

He was still alive and he was still conscious. And that meant he could still be eaten alive, kicking and screaming.

Kind of put things into perspective, didn't it? Oh, for the days when all he had to worry about was an Unforgivable Curse to the back and the oversexed members of Voldemort's Inner Circle.

He almost laughed, but didn't. Instead, he whipped around, threw himself onto his back in the rubble, and aimed his Wilson KZ 45 at…nothing. Thin air. Empty space.

"…Oh, now what?" He muttered, kicking his legs out to the side and clambering to his feet.

Once he'd straightened up enough to be able to see over the hodge podge of kitchen counters, he snapped his gaze around the kitchen, taking in as much of the room as he could with his back still pressed against something solid. Nothing. A scene from a teen horror movie flashed through his head and, blood turned cold, he ever so slowly looked up.

And there it was, clinging to the ceiling like some sort of demented Spiderman.

He froze, but it had already noticed his attention. Four bulging sets of sharp, golden eyes locked onto him and it snarled, drawing back it's upper lip to reveal a mouth packed full of fangs longer and sharper than the butcher's knives he'd made a play for earlier. It's fur was coarse and black as pitch, the only texture the swirling grey runes making tracks across it's skin. He swallowed reflexively.

And it lunged.

* * *

**Three Weeks Earlier…**

_Someone was hissing…no, laughing. Sam whirled and even as he spun, the mouldy dank of the motel room faded away, replaced by stone and tapestry. A body crashed into him and he hit the ground before he could flail for purchase. His eyes flew open and met the most unnatural green he'd ever seen. _

"_Shit, Sam - c'mon!" English accent._

_Flash. And the weight on his chest was gone. He scrambled to his feet, rubbing the back of his head with a pained grimace. _

_The wall exploded inwards, raining mortar and dust. The shockwave made his ear drums pop and he threw himself down, elbows up past his ears, fingers interlocked over the nape of his neck. He couldn't tell if the roaring in his skull was himself screaming or the utter contrast of the sudden silence._

_Flash. Sound. Lots of sound, most of it screaming. He'd moved - it was raining, and he was getting wet. Outside. Into the middle of a war. There was a castle to his back; old English, made to last sieges. A woman - hair cycling through shades of colours to blend in with her background as she moved - raced past him, right hand whipping back and forth, the stick in her hand spewing jets of light. He followed her progress to-_

_Dean._

_His brother's feet weren't touching the ground, his entire body held aloft by the hand wrapped around his throat. His nails were clawing at the fingers squeezing his windpipe, but the man choking him didn't flinch, just turned burning amber eyes in Sam's direction. The demon. Dean. He tried to rush forwards, but his feet felt like lead. He couldn't…he glanced downwards and gasped; his own body lay at his feet, bloody and broken and-_

_Flash. "POTTER!" His head snapped back up as the enraged voice echoed against stone. _

_The room he was in was large, full to the brim with scared teenagers. There were banners draped from the walls - lions, snakes, eagles and badgers. _

_Someone walked past him, slow but determined, and the children parted for him. _

"_Harry! You can't!" A woman's voice, choked with tears. "Your magic-!"_

_The boy - man, really - stopped in front of the open door, glancing back over his shoulder. Sam sucked in a breath - bright green eyes, messy black hair, lightning bolt scar; he'd seen that face before - and the man smiled sadly. "He's got Dean." _

_And then he was gone._

_Flash. "He's Potter. Mr Chosen, prophecy child, Boy-Who-Bloody-Well-Lived. If he can't kill the bastard, you'll know by all of the people bending over and kissing their arses goodbye."_

_Flash. Red eyes on white skin and pupils slit sideways like a goat's. The hissing was back. _

_The words: "Really, Tom, we've got to stop meeting like this."_

_The rebuttal: "I guarantee you, Harry, that this will be the last time."_

"_What, planning on actually staying in Hell this time?"_

_Flash. Blinding green light and someone screaming._

_Flash. "Harry's dead."_

_Flash. Blood…blood everywhere. It seeped into his hair, stained his skin. He opened his eyes - when had he closed them? - and stared. The entire school, massacred. _

_There was nothing left to do but scream._

"Sam? Sam! SAM!"

His eyes flew open, focusing on his brother's face. "Dean?" He croaked, pushing himself up from where he'd fallen back onto his single bed.

"Yeah. Dean," his brother echoed dryly, his voice rough. The unspoken 'who were you expecting?' hung awkwardly in the air. He helped him up with a hand at his elbow, scooting out of the way when Sam swung his legs off of the side of the bed.

"I'm okay, Dean." And he was. They just needed to tal-

Dean let out a breath as he straightened, a reluctant, sly grin twisting his lips upwards. Sam mentally groaned and braced himself for it.

"Chocolate and Midol, right?" Dean's grin grew just a little more genuine seeing the put on expression on his younger brother's face, but he correctly interpreted the next expression Sam's face pulled. The elder Winchester grunted. "Or we could just talk about it," he muttered, twitching his eyes left in a poor imitation of an eye roll, "…Bitch." He ignored Sam's reproving look. "So what's going down this time?"

Sam winced as he replayed the vision over in his head. He could still feel it knocking about in his skull like a live thing. Suddenly solicitous, Dean snatched the water bottle from on top of his bedside cabinet and shoved it into Sam's hands. Sam uncapped the bottle and gulped down some of the lukewarm water. It didn't help. He could still see them - none older than eighteen, all slaughtered. The blood…he felt like Lady Macbeth.

"There was a school," he said at last. "English, I think…and this man…the demon was there," he added, remembering. He ignored Dean's curse. "But I knew that man." He pushed himself off of the single bed, making a beeline for his father's journal.

It had been tossed unceremoniously onto the hard backed chair in the corner when they'd first taken over the room, and was now half-buried beneath Dean's leather jacket. Sam hurled the jacket off to one side, ignoring Dean's indignant 'oi!'. Grabbing the journal, he flipped it free of the strap of leather that bound it and began flicking through the pages.

Cradling his jacket like it was a scared child, Dean moved up to his side and peered over his shoulder.

As if that was some unspoken cue, Sam's index finger landed on the right page.

"There!" He said triumphantly, turning to present the page to Dean. "That's him. That's who I saw in my vision."

Dean took the journal, squinting at his father's scrawl and the headshot that accompanied it. The picture had obviously been taken from a badly blurred security camera, but the man's shaggy black hair and ethereal green eyes were still obvious. He whistled low. "Y'sure?"

"Positive."

"He's not going to be easy to track down," Dean observed, eyes running over the list of things John Winchester suspected this man of hunting. It was impressive, to say the least. Ghosts…possessions…minor demons…even a dragon. Conspicuously absent was a contact number or last known address. "If Dad never found him…"

"We have a name. That's a start."

"Yeah. Because in our business having a 'name' really helps," Dean said sarcastically, obviously thinking of the many times he'd flashed a fake badge in someone's face or introduced himself as Father Simmons. He frowned suddenly as he finished reading the passage. "Wait a minute. There's no name here, Sammy."

"Yeah, I know," Sam said, watching his brother's face. "But a lot of people in the vision seemed to know who he was."

Dean raised an impatient brow.

"They called him Harry. Harry Potter."

* * *

Harry skidded out of the kitchen, into the hotel's old entrance hall, and nearly went down. His hands hit the rotten floor boards and he flung himself out of the doorway. Behind him, he heard a sharp clang as the creature dove headfirst into the metal of an industrial oven and then the heavy, laboured breathing and steady staccato of impact tremors.

It was coming after him.

Cursing like an entire Navy of drunken sailors, he scuttled, crab-like, across the entrance hall. Halfway across he found his feet. And the creature found the door.

He hit the locked front door - and promptly berated himself for coming through a previously boarded up back window - as the creature stepped into the room. It snorted irritably and bared its razor sharp fangs, pawing at the ground like an angry bull. He barely had enough time to whip around, slam his back into the panelled wood barring his exit, and…notice the large, crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling. And then the thing charged him.

Bracing himself, he jerked his Wilson up and fired.

The bullet pierced the frayed cord holding the chandelier suspended cleanly. It came crashing down amid the twinkle of clashing crystal and slammed into the creature's back as it raced across the room. The blow knocked its feet out from underneath it and sent it to the ground. And, he thought, hopefully snapped its spine clean in two.

The creature didn't get back up. He watched it for another three seconds, his heart beat harsh in his ear, but it didn't so much as twitch.

"Yippee-ky-yay, Motherfucker," he said just because he couldn't not.

He clicked the safety back onto his gun, turned, and unceremoniously kicked the door in.

The wood splintered but didn't give; he slammed another snap kick into the door and watched as it shattered, the pieces flying backwards and away from his foot.

When he stepped into the doorway and out of the hotel, he genuinely didn't see the fist coming at his face until he was lying flat on his back with a young slip of a girl straddling his hips. Her combat boots were pressing his wrists into the wooden decking. Pupiless black eyes blinked down at him, accompanied by a malicious smirk and a killer migraine. He groaned. And got a backhand across the mouth for his trouble.

"What the Hell?" he demanded.

"You don't seem so damnably lucky to me," she said in a refined English accent that almost made him homesick and sounded like she was quoting something. "Infact…" And then she was shifting up his body, hands reaching for his jaw. And his neck. The first touch was delicate - questing, really. But the second was rough as her fingernails dug into his throat and beneath his chin and began to turn. The movement was slow - ever so slow - but firm and he had no doubt that she truly did intend to twist his head straight off of his shoulders.

He bucked, jerking and kicking. But she held on like a vicious limpet. She even leaned in after a particularly determined attempt to unseat her and breathed into his ear, "Welcome, Harry James Potter, to the day that you die." She nipped at his ear and Harry felt inhumanly long incisors against his ear lobe. There was the sting of broken skin and then the hot brush of a wet tongue.

Harry shuddered and tried to tear his head away. Her grip anchored him in place. "Don't tell me. I'm wearing my 'my name's Harry J. Potter and I fight evil' name badge again."

She laughed into his ear. "You want to know how I know?" She purred. "How do you think? He's back."

He froze and it felt like his heart had stopped. He couldn't breathe. And it wasn't just because she was sitting on his lungs. "He's-" his voice cracked and he licked his lips before trying again. "He's back, huh? Funny. I didn't slate Elvis for a comeback."

Another backhand that nearly broke his neck for real this time; superhuman strength? Check.

"Try again, Potter," she snapped. "You know who I mean."

And he did; it was his worst nightmare - he still bolted awake in the dead of the night to find his sheets soaked through with sweat and his heart pounding like he'd sprinted the London Marathon. A couple of thousand miles and a new nomadic life in Northern America wasn't enough to purge his mind of the horrors that he'd seen. That he'd felt. That he'd done. "Voldemort."

"Hmmhm," she moaned - honest to God moaned, "And Daddy's very, very angry with you for running away. I think you broke his heart, Harry, and that's a very, very naughty thing to do."

"How long has he been back?" He demanded, his gaze ticking upwards towards his scar unbidden.

"You're asking the wrong questions," she pouted and eased up on the slow decapitation she'd been set on giving him. His neck ached with a mixture of the strain and the sudden relief. "You should be asking what he's done since he's been back. Because it's a doozy."

"Fine. Consider the question asked."

"Why, Harry, he's done everything." She leaned even closer, rubbing the swell of her breasts against his chest and added, in faux conspiration, "You're the last thing on his list, you and your pesky little chicklets."

The Order. Harry felt a flush of relief and it nearly made him giddy. But why would Voldemort leave the Order alive? It wasn't like they'd be disabled, even without Harry - who had spearheaded the organisation for the last year of it's activity after Dumbledore had stepped aside. They'd be a constant thorn in his side, an aching ulcer.

It came to him.

Voldemort wouldn't tear the Order apart until he was there to see it. To watch and be unable to do anything. To hear their screams as they were tortured to death. Eaten alive. Murdered and made to enjoy it.

She was still speaking: "He's ripped the country apart trying to find you, Harry. Can you imagine the disappointment he felt when he didn't find you? It was a good day - we slaughtered children in front of their parents and bathed them in their babe's bone marrow; he wrote a letter to you in their blood. But you didn't answer. So he began to wonder why. And he widened his search. And he found you. And he knew why he couldn't feel you anymore." She cocked her head. "How does it feel, Harry?"

He glared. "How does what feel?"

"Why," she smirked, "to be completely and utterly unremarkable."

"I'd imagine it's something like this," he snapped. And he moved. His skull slammed into hers with a sickening crack and she flung herself backwards. One foot slipped away from his wrist and that was all he needed; he tore her fingers from his windpipe, ripped his other wrist out from beneath her weight and then flung himself at her.

This time when they hit the ground, he had the advantage. He yanked her arms above her head and tangled her legs with his, carefully smothering her knees with his thighs.

"How does it feel?" He growled at her.

He didn't give her time to answer, guessing that it would come in the form of her exerting some of her superhuman strength and kicking his butt. Instead, he dove across her and grabbed his gun from where it was lying a few feet away. He clicked the safety off and aimed it smack bang in the middle of her forehead.

She went very, very still.

And it wasn't because he had a gun pointed between her eyes; she cocked her head, tilting her ear upwards as though listening very intently to something. A second or two later he heard it, too.

The clinking of crystal shards and the deep 'schurnf'ing that was oh so painfully familiar.

She smirked. "I'll be seeing you around, lover," she said. And then she disappeared in a swirl of charred black smoke and the overpowering smell of burning sulphur.

As she faded into nothingness, an impossibly loud crash came from inside the hotel. If Harry had to guess, he would say that the chandelier had just been sent flying across the entrance hall. He didn't want to hang around for the creature to find him again.

He jumped back up onto his feet and bolted across the decking. There were woods surrounding the hotel and the mile long driveway back to the main road and his car. He'd never outrun the creature on open ground; his only chance to make it to his car - and his silver bullets - would be to make a mad dash through the woods and hope that the undergrowth would be dense enough to slow the creature down.

Or maybe he could try dropping a tree on its head instead and compare the results to that of the chandelier.

It would be like the science experiment from Hell. Literally.

As he ran he heard the rev of an engine and, more worryingly, the earth-shaking thuds that heralded the creature's arrival. The decking began to tremble beneath his pounding feet. It was like running on a trampoline. He could feel the creature's hot breath on the back of his neck - images of the thing's teeth sinking into the nape of his neck and ripping out his spinal cord flashed through his mind's eye - as he leapt from the decking and into the road.

A '67 Chevy Impala tore around the bend in the road so fast that two of its tires left the gravel driveway.

His eyes widened - the black, silver-edged Impala was only feet away - and he flung himself off of the road just as the creature pounced and landed where he'd been standing only nanoseconds before. He landed in a ditch by the side of the road and rolled to a stop to the sound of shrieking brakes and the primal crunch of bone.

When he stuck his head out of the ditch and took stock of the situation, the creature was lying on its side a full ten metres away from the now stationary Impala. It was still breathing and slowly regaining its bearings.

The barrel of a sawn-off shotgun suddenly appeared out of the Impala's rolled down passenger's side window. The end of it erupted with a bark. Once. Twice. Three times.

All three bullets hit their mark and where they hit they left a trail of melting flesh. The creature's runes flared a hot, mercurial orange and then faded away completely, the heat of the glow sloughing the creature's skin away from it's muscle.

Silver bullets. The creature was dead.

"Now that's just nasty."

Harry staggered to his feet and clambered up out of the ditch. The man who had spoken - the Impala's driver - was stepping out of the car, his heavy biker boots crunching solidly on the gravel. His passenger slid out of the other side of the car, tall and slim but broad across the shoulders with it.

"Thanks for the save," Harry said. A second later, his Wilson was pointed in the strangers' direction. He said, voice perfectly even, "All things considered, I hope you'll forgive me if I don't rush to believe that you didn't save me just to kill me yourselves. I'm feeling cynical today. Must be the weather."

The driver snorted, "The thanks you get from some people."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Harry said, "for some reason I don't remember asking for your help."

"Right," the driver said, turning to get back into the Impala, "well, that's that then, Sammy. Good try and all, but that is not some sort of English super hero."

"Dean-"

Harry blinked. "Winchester?"

Dean jerked his chin upwards challengingly. "What of it?"

"Sam and Dean. Is that Winchester?" Harry repeated without much patience. He put a bit more life into his practically comatose English accent just to see the bemused look on the driver's - Dean's - face.

"Yeah, that's right," Sam said, beating Dean to whatever he was going to say. His older brother snapped his mouth shut with a frown. "…Harry Potter?"

"Maybe once." Harry said. Grunting, he shoved his free hand into his leather jacket and when it withdrew, three clear vials were trapped in the circle of it. He tossed two of them at the Winchester brothers, who snatched them deftly from the air. "Holy water," he said by way of explanation, "you know what to do."

In demonstration, he uncapped the vial that he'd kept for himself and then unceremoniously upended the contents into his mouth. It was just like water; only dark creatures - and even then, not all - were burned by holy water. Ex-Wizards-turned-Hunters need not apply.

Swishing the water about his mouth for a second or two and enjoying the feel of it seeping into the parched tissue, Harry jerked his head at the other two Hunters. The meaning was clear: well, get on with it, then.

Sam moved first, opening the vial with an easy flick of the thumb. He sniffed the water before tasting it, though what he expected to smell, Harry had no idea. Carefully tipping his head back, he let the smallest drop of holy water splash onto his tongue. At his side, his elder brother was doing much the same. When nothing untoward happened, they glanced at each other and almost visibly shrugged. Dean drank the full vial of it first and, a full ten seconds later, Sam followed suit.

When neither of them dropped dead, Dean tossed his vial off to the side, the glass shattering against the gravel, and Sam turned back to Harry, one brow quirked. "So, Harry Potter?" he asked again like he needed to make sure.

Harry clicked the safety back onto his gun, holstering it between the waistband of his jeans and the skin of his back. "Not for a long time. It's just 'Harry' now; I've found that surnames can be a bit redundant in this business." He quirked a smile, though he really wasn't in a smiling mood; Voldemort was back. And Harry could think of ten million things that would have been on his 'list' along with eradicating him and his 'pesky little chicklets'. Nine million of them he would have happily given his life to prevent. All apparently done.

"Speaking of which, what can I do for you?"

"We're going to England," Sam said.

Harry's eyebrows shot up into his hairline. That was one hell of a coincidence. "And you need a tour guide?"

"Erm, not exactly."

"Didn't think so," Harry said with a resigned sigh. "How much do you know?" He frowned and eyed the two of them in a new, not entirely favourable light. "And how do you know it?" How could two Hunters who shouldn't have a clue about the Wizarding world notice Voldemort's resurrection before him?

And that wasn't just him being egotistical. He was a half-decent Hunter, yes, but he was also Harry Potter, no matter how many nights he spent lying awake, staring at the ceiling, and trying to convince himself that it was just 'Harry' now. As Harry Potter, he had a curse scar that linked him to Voldemort, full prior knowledge of the Wizarding world, and more than a little interest in the state of affairs in England.

Or so he'd thought.

The Winchester brothers exchanged glances. The second or two of silence made Harry uneasy and he was inordinately relieved when Sam turned back to him and Dean leaned back against the side of the Impala in dark acceptance. Whatever they'd been silently arguing about, Sam had won that round. Harry waited expectantly.

"This is going to sound crazy," Sam said.

Harry snorted. "To this audience?"

"Maybe not," he conceded with a wry, unbidden smile. He drew in a breath that Harry heard even across the full ten feet that separated them. "I get these…visions. Of the future. I guess the simplest way to say this is that we know about…this because I saw it."

"Visions."

"You hard of hearing or something?" Dean snapped, arms folded across his chest. "Because he didn't stutter."

Harry ignored him, which only seemed to rile the other Hunter up further. "So you've Seen it," he said, still not entirely sure he accepted the explanation; clairvoyancy was a blurry discipline at best, and that was ignoring Trelawney's existence. "Did you see the end of it?"

If Harry wasn't mistaken, Sam seemed to pale a few shades of green. "I saw how it could end," Sam said at last, looking like he wished he hadn't admitted it, "unless we stop it."

Harry nodded. So it wasn't a happy ending. He wasn't much surprised. "And how does this involve you?"

Sam seemed to pick up on what he hadn't said and raised a brow. "So you're going?"

He shrugged. "It's my fight." He swallowed and tried again, "It used to be my fight. They all deserve to know why it isn't anymore." He snorted, "Guess it's time to face the music…they're going to kill me."

"They might have to get in line," Dean said dryly. At Harry's curious glance he simply smirked.

"I saw the final battle," Sam filled in. "It was crawling with demons."

"And that's where you two come in," Harry guessed. It made sense - the Wizarding world was utterly unprepared to deal with demons; they'd be slaughtered.

The other two Hunters exchanged a quick glance again but then Sam was nodding. "That's where we come in," he agreed, adding, "someone needs to stop what's going to happen. If that's us, then it's us."

"Just call us your friendly neighbourhood demon killers," Dean said.

"It sounds like you've got it covered," Harry said, "why find me?"

"I saw you," Sam said, and Harry reflected that he really should have seen it - no pun intended - coming. "Harry Potter: Mr Chosen, prophecy child, Boy-Who-Bloody-Well-Lived." Sam was watching him closely as he concluded, "You're the only one who can kill him."

Harry couldn't help the short chuckle that escaped from his throat like a rat fleeing from a sinking ship. "Malfoy," he said like it explained everything. To him, it did. "We'd better hope that isn't true or there'll be a lot of people bending over and kissing their asses goodbye."

"He said that, too," Sam said.

"Of course he did," Harry said. He hesitated. Was he going? He'd said that he was, had said it was 'his fight' or, at least, that it had been. It wasn't anymore; he couldn't be the war General that he'd been at seventeen. In a war of magic, he'd be a burden, a sitting duck in the middle of the battle field, even with his gun and Hunting skills. Even just the demons would be a challenge and, with his scar and hair acting like the visual beacon they usually were to people in the know, he'd never be left alone on the sidelines to go about his business.

But the Wizarding world needed all the help it could get.

And it needed to know that was down one saviour. People could die still thinking that he'd ride in on his Firebolt and save them. They needed to know it wasn't going to happen - the pang in his chest let him know that the Gryffindor in him wouldn't let it be any other way.

He forced a smile at the Winchesters.

"So when do we leave?"


	2. Homecoming

**CHAPTER ONE: HOMECOMING**

"So, how did you find me, anyway? I don't exactly advertise in the Yellow Pages."

When no reply was immediately forthcoming, Harry hesitated over the packet of ready salted peanuts he'd been warring against, and glanced to his right. Dean wasn't even looking at him, far too busy gouging his own fingerprints into his armrest to pay attention to little things like sudden conversation, but Sam was. And he looked downright shifty.

Harry felt his lips tighten, thinning out into a severe slash of colour that would have done McGonagall proud. "Don't worry," he said darkly, "I'm _certainly_ not jumping to any unfavourable conclusions or anything."

All things considered, Harry decided to put down the peanuts.

Sam recovered surprisingly quickly, so fast that Harry didn't even see the cogs turning. But it was all just a little too late; Harry didn't buy it for one moment when Sam shrugged easily and said, "My vision…"

It had been a tight squeeze fitting comfortably into their assigned row, broad shoulders and lanky frames making it difficult; even Harry, easily the shortest of the three men, felt short-changed by just how little he could stretch his legs out in the confined space. Packed like sardines would've been an apt analogy, Harry thought, deciding that being able to feel Sam's breath brush hotly against his cheek when he spoke definitely counted as an unavoidable invasion of personal space.

Harry snorted. "Oh, c'mon," he said, feeling distinctly uncharitable, "we both know that it wasn't the vision."

Dean hacked out a decidedly unhappy laugh. "Oh, right," he drawled, still staring straight ahead and still clinging to his armrests like life itself depended on it, "we're all on the same frickin' page alright."

Harry blinked, filed the comment away for later analysis, and then switched his attention back to Sam, who looked a little sheepish.

"We didn't stalk you or anything," Sam said, apparently smart enough to realise when he'd been well and truly rumbled. Harry blinked, and then smirked in amusement. That hadn't exactly been where his head had been, but judging from the awkwardness on Sam's face, the other man wasn't thinking of anything worse - stalking someone was clearly the pinnacle of evil according to Sam Winchester. Harry quirked a single eyebrow, and Sam rushed to add, "Well, okay, so there might have been a little stalking. A very limited amount of stalking. I…" Sam chuckled uneasily, "you're a tricky man to track down, you know that?"

"Hmm," Harry said, picking up his peanuts and inspecting the rather abused vacuum seal. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Dean recover from a particularly rough patch of turbulence and shoot Sam a chagrined glare. Sam's shaggy head of hair - still nothing compared to the Potter trademarked mop that Harry sported - shook in response, and Harry was quite sure that the younger brother was mouthing something to the eldest. Unless Dean's eyes were zeroing in on Sam's lips for another reason, of course.

Harry snorted again and turned his attention out of the window, unconcerned with the exchange going on beside him. They'd been in the air for a few hours now, and all that Harry could see from his - much fought over and coveted - window seat was a thin layer of wispy cloud obstructing any view he might have had of the Atlantic ocean. Finding no entertainment from that quarter, and long since having grown bored of the inflight movie - hence talking to Sam in the first place - Harry sighed.

It was going to be a long flight.

"Har--er, Mr. Potter?"

Harry grimaced at the title, half-feeling like Voldemort was about to jump forward from the seat behind and yell 'aha!'. When nothing happened, and really nothing had ever been about to, Harry looked back over at the Winchester brothers and raised a brow in question.

Sam continued, "Maybe you could clarify a few things for us. About, y'know, that new fantasy novel that you're writing?" Fantasy novel--? Sam glanced around the cabin with just enough unease for Harry to catch on. Oh. _That _fantasy novel.

"What do you want to know?" Harry asked, swallowing back a lump in his throat and trying to repress the tight feeling of distrust constricting his ribcage. If it had been anyone else, there wouldn't have even been an issue - he'd have whacked them upside the head with the butt of his Wilson and then burnt rubber getting out of there before they woke up and started asking more questions. But the Winchesters - well, besides being stuck on a transatlantic flight with the two of them and having absolutely no where to burn rubber _to, _they were putting themselves out to save the people he loved…_had _loved. Once. They were risking their lives for a society they shouldn't have _known _about let alone be willing to die for. Harry didn't want them to die doing what should've been his job. So they needed to know, as much as he could tell them that might make them understand how scared shitless they should be right now. Didn't mean he was happy about it.

"Anything you can tell us," Sam said, "it all sounds so…original."

"Yeah," was Dean's input, still tense and sarcastic, "the boy's going to win a Pulitzer."

"I'd start from the beginning," Harry said, ignoring Dean entirely, "but that's a lot of ground to cover. Like Merlin and Camelot type mileage. Plus," Harry rolled his eyes a fraction to the right, "it'll ruin the plot." He shrugged, "I guess the best place to start from is a thousand years or so ago, back in the time of the Four Founders."

"The dudes who signed the Declaration of Independence?" Dean blurted.

"Those were the _Founding Fathers_, Dean," Sam said, looking appalled at the lack of attention Dean had paid to History class. Or maybe just school in general.

"…I knew that."

"Anyway, these guys were definitely British. Also not all 'fathers'," Harry said. Dean's expression turned slightly sour at the reminder that he was sharing this plane with more than just his brother, but Sam looked plenty happy at the prospect of furthering his knowledge of the wizarding world. Determined to keep the illusion of being a fledgling author and at least pretend to be conforming to the Statute of Secrecy, Harry added, "though I could tweak things around a little, maybe. Make one of them American…maybe it'd give the book a more PC, multicultural feel, what do you think?"

"I think you're probably fine," Sam said, wryly. "What else is there?"

"Well, they were…they were wizards. The greatest and most brilliant of their generation, though each as different to the others as the Sun to the Moon. There was Ravenclaw, fiercely intelligent and thirsting for knowledge; Hufflepuff, hard-working and loyal; Gryffindor, chivalrous and brave; and Slytherin, who was…he was cunning and ambitious. When they built the school - er, Hogwarts, they built Hogwarts, a place where little witches and wizards could grow up to be big witches and big wizards without worry of scared Muggles or bursts of wild magic - well, when they built the place, they gave it four Houses: Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, Gryffindor and Slytherin."

"An eagle, a badger, a lion, and a snake," Sam said, voice tinged with dawning realisation.

Harry blinked. "Your--"

"Vision. Yeah," Sam confirmed quietly.

Apparently sensing the need for a distraction of sorts, Dean started to loudly make a fuss over the latest bout of turbulence. "--And where'd this damn pilot get his license, anyway, Wacky Races?--"

"What _did _you see, exactly?" Harry asked, as everyone within earshot focused all of their attention on the loud man mouthing off in seat 28C, and not the seemingly casual conversation going on next to him.

"Just…feelings. Thoughts. Awareness of things," Sam said. Harry narrowed his eyes a fraction of an inch, having detected Sam's initial hesitance. However, it was a pause that was easily explained away - Sam might've never told anyone but his brother before, and it had been a personal question with an answer perhaps not simply worded - and Harry ignored it. "I saw that man, that monster…what did you call him?"

"--please tell me he _has _a license--"

"Voldemort," Harry supplied, feeling like he'd choke on the name. He didn't, of course; he wouldn't give that bastard the satisfaction.

"Flight from death," Sam said, "of course. Clever."

"--brother's at Stanford Law. He has _connections_--"

Harry grunted. "Remarkable, really," he said grudgingly, "especially since it's all just an anagram." He caught the bemused look that flitted across Sam's face and added, "Oh, yeah, lot of literary coincidences going on in the wizarding world. Alliteration…clever little anagrams…Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore being called, well, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore. Did you know that Albus Dumbledore means 'white hat'? Funny, the leader of the Order being ca--" Harry abruptly snapped his mouth shut, before glancing sideways at Sam. "What else did you see?"

"--Sir, if you'd please calm down. You're disturbing the other--"

"Just that, really," Sam said. Harry looked at him, and Sam looked back, one aware that the other was telling a half-truth, and the other aware that the other knew.

Finally, Harry sighed. "I'm going to call you on that one day, you know," he said, "but probably not today." He angled a glance at Dean, who'd taken one look at the somewhat pug-faced air stewardess - kind of reminded Harry of Pansy Parkinson, actually - and started to complain with renewed enthusiasm. He was in the middle of a rant about parachutes and the lifeboat to passenger ratio on the Titanic, a note of hysteria in his voice that Harry didn't think was faked, when Harry cleared his throat and said pointedly, "So, back to my fictional story of…er, fiction."

"Right," Dean said, before turning a charming grin on the stewardess, "whatever you say, ma'am."

The air stewardess' unimpressed glare slowly thawed. "Yes, well," she said, lips twitching upwards slightly when Dean plastered an innocent expression on his face, "can I get you anything, sir?"

Immediately spotting the look that flashed across Dean's face, and already sick of the flirting, Harry leaned across Sam and smiled his own, award-winning might he add, grin at the woman. The moment he had her attention he winked, and said, "Not just now, love. Thanks."

Her reaction was all the proof Harry needed that women loved an accent; having slipped back into an English drawl that wouldn't have been out of place in his school days, Harry was rewarded by the blush that spread across the American's cheeks like wild fire in dry bush. Feeling rather self-satisfied when the stewardess giggled slightly, curtsied - of all things, _curtsied_! - and then walked off, hips swaying rather interestingly, Harry eased back over to his side of the row. He raised a single eyebrow at the amused look on Sam's face, and simply shrugged when he caught Dean's unimpressed stare.

"We don't have a lot of time," he said.

"We have _five hours_," Dean said.

"Right," Harry said, "exactly."

So he talked. He talked about the war that had raged between Gryffindor and Slytherin, and how Slytherin's own opinions still shaped some purebloods' antiquated views of non-magical _anything_. He talked about the enchantments cast on Hogwarts that made it the safest building in all of Britain, and completely inaccessible to the uninitiated Muggle. He talked about Tom Riddle, and Horcruxes, and his slow, steady slide towards becoming Lord Voldemort. He talked about Albus Dumbledore, and the Order of the Phoenix, and then he talked about his parents - and the Marauders - and how they'd joined the Order straight out of school. He talked about the prophecy, and the Fidelius charm, and his own birth that July. He talked about Neville Longbottom for longer than was strictly necessary, and suddenly found himself talking about Snape and his journey from first year Slytherin to Order spy. Then he talked about every offensive spell he could think of, not a simple task for the old General of the DA, and once leader of the Order. Eventually, though, he couldn't postpone it any longer, and he talked about Halloween, 1981. He talked about his Hogwarts letter and about realising that he was the Boy-Who-Lived. He talked about Sirius' innocence, and Peter's betrayal, and Voldemort's resurrection, and, finally, he talked about the Battle of Hogwarts.

"So many people died," he said, still staring at the exact same spot of the headrest in front of him as he had been for the past four hours. He felt numb, like his entire body had been submerged in ice water. "I wanted to help -- I _could've _-- but I had my job to do, and I couldn't afford to become distracted. So I killed him; ripped him into itty, bitty pieces and then tossed each disgusting part of him into a different corner of Hell. Seven pieces, one for each fragment of his soul. I thought it would be enough--I charmed those things so thoroughly that…I'm getting ahead of myself. I killed him, and then I left. I couldn't stay around there anymore. All of the press, all of the attention, everyone just looking at me like they were waiting for me to explode. Or, worse, step up and start doing all of these 'great things' that they were expecting. I couldn't stand it. I wasn't anything special, never have been.

"The US seemed like the right place to go to; I'd heard someone say once how easy it was to get lost there, and that seemed exactly what I needed. So I landed in Chicago, completely lost, a little clueless. Ended up saving a Hunter named Dresden from some demon monkeys, and got myself a crash course in all of the things that go bump in the night. I thought I'd just ignore it all at first -- it wasn't my problem, all I wanted was to be left alone. But I guess my 'hero complex' kicked in. Least, that's what Hermione called it, back when…at any rate, I couldn't just sit there. I'd find myself lying awake in the early hours of the morning, wondering how many people could be needing my help right then. So I decided to Hell with it, maybe I just wasn't cut out for 'normal', you know?

"Probably a good thing I didn't let myself get out of shape, with Voldemort being back and everything." Harry finally tore his eyes away from the specific patch of blue fabric that he'd been dead set on memorising for a long while now, and looked over to the Winchester brothers. Both looked solemn. Harry shrugged, "The rest I think you know."

"That's some story," Dean said at last, his voice gruff. His voice wasn't exactly teasing when he added, "If you expect us to start worshipping you and calling you 'hero' just because you happened to survive puberty--"

"_Dean_!" Sam said.

"It's okay," Harry said, already standing. He had to duck his head to avoid catching it on the overhead storage compartment, but he didn't care -- he needed out of there before he started doing something he'd regret later. Like cry. "I don't think I'd believe it, either. If you'll excuse me…nature calls."

Harry shuffled past Sam, and then past Dean, 'accidentally' catching the steel-reinforced toe of his boot on the older brother's shin. He flashed a tight-lipped, unenthusiastic smile in what could be loosely termed an apology, and then headed down the narrow aisle towards the bathroom. That was a very loose definition, too; being crammed into a 'room' barely bigger than a coffin wasn't Harry's idea of 'space', but it was better than nothing.

"Could you _be _any colder towards the guy, Dean?" he heard Sam demand from behind him, obviously believing him to be out of earshot.

"I don't trust him," Dean's voice replied defensively, "and you shouldn't either, Sammy."

Well. At least the feeling was mutual.

* * *

Benedict Carlisle eyed the array of detectors in front of him in wary bemusement, his cup of Earl Grey - milk and two sugars - slowly going cold by his elbow. Ever so slowly, the man brought his wand up and tentatively tapped the alarm's glass-casing. Nothing changed -- the alarm in question continued to flash, illuminating the concrete wall behind it in a sickly blood red.

"Oh dear," he said, rising from his chair and feeling every one of his sixty-five years. "Oh dear, oh dear." His voice seemed to echo, even in the small, grey bunker he'd been assigned to; incongruously, the alarm made no sound. The whirring noise in Benedict's head was simply the sound of his panicked heart pushing his blood through his veins.

What was he to do? The alarm housed on level 42 of the Watch Tower was of great importance, both to You-Know-Who and everyone else. For the good of his station as a Death Eater - and the title left a bitter taste in his mouth even after all of this time - he should owl You-Know-Who immediately. For the good of the rest of the country, he should keep it to himself. Benedict hadn't _chosen _to become a Death Eater, not truly. But his entire family had been enslaved in the camps, and the sickness that had twined itself around his little, baby granddaughter had been terrifying in its gravity.

Had he been younger, the romantic lure of defying You-Know-Who and joining the resistance would have been impossible to deny, but Benedict was sixty-five, and his family only lived at the sufferance of You-Know-Who himself. What was he to do?

It was an example of the sod's law that the Universe is so famed for that one of his colleagues chose just then to knock on the door.

"Y-yes?" Benedict called out tremulously.

"Hey, Benny," a voice said. A second later, the door swung open. A tall, robust sort of youth was standing in the door way, his neatly combed hair a scant inch away from tickling the frame. "How're y--oh. Oh, dear."

Benedict had relaxed the moment he'd recognised the younger man's voice, but now he snorted. "Quite so. You took the words right out of my mouth, dear boy."

"I suppose we have to tell him? The Dark Lord will want to know."

"I suppose so, yes. Oh, dear. I can never quite remember just what that particular alarm _means_." This was a complete and utter lie, of course. Even people who had never set foot inside the Watch Tower knew of the big, red alarm on Floor 42, and everyone in the Dark Lord's service knew what it had been calibrated for. Not daring to meet the boy's eyes, Benedict began searching for a scrap of parchment and a quill.

However, the brown-haired youth didn't seem to care about the lie. He was staring at the flashing alarm with an inscrutable look on his face, and he didn't take his gaze away from it even when he spoke.

"So, Harry Potter's returned to Britain after all."

* * *

The first splash of ice water on his face almost stung, the cold was so biting. However, by the third sluice of freezing water, his skin had acclimated, and he no longer had to suck in a breath every time he splashed the tap water onto his face. Slumped over the shallow basin in the airplane's bathroom, Harry finally twisted the faucet tightly closed and watched the water swirl down the drain. Fingers still dripping, and face still slick, Harry rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, and then raked his right hand through his already rather tousled hair.

When he finally looked up, the sight that met him in the narrow mirror almost made him take a step back.

The man peering back at him looked tired, drained; there was the slightest discolouration under his eyes that spoke of insomnia and sleepless nights spent hunting ghouls, and his eyes themselves didn't shine anymore. Harry didn't think that was because of the blue-tinted contacts he was using as disguise. Rather, he'd simply seen too many things and done far too much more for his eyes to be mistaken for young. There was a hardness there now that there hadn't been before -- he'd been determined but scared all throughout his teenage years, and just plain broken in his early twenties. Before even that, he'd been frustratingly young, unable to understand why Aunt Petunia didn't bake _him _fairy cakes, why Uncle Vernon didn't teach _him _how to ride a bike with only two wheels. Now, the milestone of his thirtieth birthday looming just over a year away, his eyes were a molten, emerald steel.

Harry snorted, and looked away from the mirror, turning his entire body away from it when his peripheral vision proved too accurate. "What doesn't kill you," he muttered bitterly.

Reliving his past had been difficult, and that statement alone was worthy of nomination for understatement of the year. In fact, Harry felt terrible -- he was slightly nauseous, like all of his internal organs were trying to escape by way of lurching up through his throat and abandoning ship; his head was pounding in time to his heart beat; and his skin felt too tight, something that the cold water had only exacerbated.

All told, he was no where near ready for the 'seatbelt' sign overhead to switch on with a high-pitched '_DING_!'.

Harry groaned, but breathed in deeply none-the-less. He got himself under control and his game face on in less than three seconds. A split second later, he'd flicked the catch free, opened the door, and stepped out into the belly proper of the commercial airplane. It took exactly twenty-three somewhat stunted strides to reach row 28 - Harry counted - and then another eight seconds to get to his seat without having to actually say anything.

He snapped the two ends of his seatbelt together and stubbornly ignored the way that Dean was stubbornly ignoring _him_.

"So, er, how does it feel to be nearly home?" Sam asked after a moment. Out of the corner of his eye, Harry noted that Sam had turned his back on Dean as much as he could in the cramped space. Clearly a case of 'if you can't say anything nice, I'm going to ignore you until you get a clue'. It made Harry think of Ron and Hermione, and did _not _help with his stomach ache.

"It's a lot like sea sickness," Harry said. He decided that he wasn't even going to touch the 'home' issue; Britain hadn't been home in _years_. Home was Chicago…or had been until that ill-fated hunt in Texas. Then wham, bam, thank you ma'am, here Harry was, on a British Airways flight to Hell. He supposed Chicago wasn't home anymore now, either. Somehow he couldn't see himself going back. And he didn't want to _think _about what that said about what he'd been doing there for the last ten years. Probably nothing good.

Sam chuckled, "Man, I know that feeling."

Harry very much doubted it, but he kept his mouth shut. You just couldn't tell with some people, and Harry knew a very limited amount about the Winchesters anyway. The last thing he wanted to do was to insult some Oliver Twist type by insisting they'd lived a life of relative luxury and never felt the cold, squelchy, 'I want to get off the world' feeling that currently had Harry so ensnared. Instead he smiled tightly and said, "Yeah. It's a doozy."

Further conversation was sparse, consisting mostly of unnecessary repetitions of things already said, until the plane touched down -- on British soil, Jesus, Harry was going to be sick -- and they off-loaded.

They'd barely gotten ten steps off of the plane, Harry taking point as they crossed over the passenger gateway that had docked between the plane and the airport proper, before all three noticed an almost suffocating sense of _wrongness_.

"Is anyone else's spidey sense tingling?" Dean asked, voice hushed as he eyed two security guards watching the procession of passengers disembark from the plane.

"Something's rotten in the state of Denmark, alright," Sam agreed quietly, drawing a bemused look from his brother and a confirming nod from Harry. "Just try to…blend in."

"Easy for you to say, college boy," Dean shot back, glancing pointedly down at his attire, and then at Harry's. Both Harry and Dean were dressed in surprisingly similar wardrobes: biker boots, leather jackets, and wornout blue jeans. The only differences were barely worth mentioning -- Harry's jacket was black, not brown, he wasn't wearing flannel, and the pendant around his neck was more than just a trinket with sentimental value, but that was all. Compared to Sam in his lightweight jacket, converse sneakers and what looked like brand new jeans, the two stuck out like sore thumbs. Two renegade, rough-and-ready sore thumbs. At the moment, it wasn't the most helpful of looks.

"You ever heard the saying about plain sight?" Sam said, his rejoinder drawing an exasperated sigh from Dean and a slightly worried look from Harry. It wasn't that he didn't think it would work, it was just that…well, alright, he didn't think it would work.

"Nope, never heard it," Dean said belligerently, "did you get some road kill to tell you that one?"

"Just walk, alright?" Harry said, lifting his voice a bit to cut over Sam's reply. They were approaching passport control, swept along by all of the other passengers. While bickering as they moved through the corridors might have been an acceptable method of 'hiding in plain sight', bickering in the queue for passport control would just draw unnecessary attention. Security was beefed up as it was. In fact…

"Merlin," Harry said as they spilled out of the corridor and into a large room dedicated to passport control. "They're not even trying to hide it."

Indeed, they weren't. The walls of the room were lined with masked wizards in full wizard dress, black robes sweeping the floor and drawing startled, bemused glances from some of the Muggles. More masked wizards weaved their way through the room, every so often swooping down on a Muggle and dragging them away from their friends or family like birds of prey singling out unwitting mice.

The Muggles were beginning to realise it -- the odd individual was breaking from the neat queues they'd been shepherded into, and protests were beginning to flare up. 'You can't do this to me--I'm an American!' rang out from somewhere near by, drawing curious glances that didn't last very long. After all, after 9/11 and 7/7, of course security was going to have been increased. As far as the vast majority of the Muggles were concerned, that was all this was. Harry had other ideas.

"_Fuck_," he said, suddenly getting it in a flash of horrified inspiration. Despite the righteous anger he could feel coiling in his gut, Harry let Sam herd him into one of the queues, and tried his best to keep his head down. "That's what they're doing -- they're _culling_."

"What?" Sam demanded.

"Picking out the best to serve their Master," Harry said, voice barely a snarl, "that's what's going on here -- why they're still allowing flights into the country. They take the incoming passengers and…well, I don't know. But I bet that when they _leave _the country they're not the ones in complete control of their faculties."

"Mind control?"

"The Imperious Curse."

"How do you know?" Dean demanded suspiciously.

Harry snorted. "Trust me," he said, "this has 'Voldemort' written all over it." He tried to peer ahead, past the milling crowd and the passport control booths to what was going on beyond it, but there was a wall in the way, and all he could hear was the inane chatter going on around him. "See how calm everyone is? That's part media conditioning, alright, but it's part something else, too, I'll bet. There's probably an enchantment of some sort in the air. A cheering charm, maybe, or even some sort of Muggle repelling charm. Not to turn them away, but to keep them from really seeing what's happening, like a veil."

"Then how come I can see it just fine?" Dean said, the suspicion in his voice plain for all to hear.

"You've just been told what to look for," Harry pointed out, "and you've been trained to recognise the supernatural. Besides, it can't be very strong, otherwise the Muggles wouldn't notice _anything_. Not even the other Muggles."

"Right," Sam said, "so what are we going to do about it?"

Harry frowned. That was a good question. He'd just opened his mouth to deliver his plan -- guerrilla tactics, distract and ambush -- when Dean cut in, "Nothing. We're going to do nothing." Harry made a wordless noise of protest in the back of his throat, and Dean said, "We have bigger fish to fry here. If we get caught trying to help these people, we can't help anyone else -- and we _will _be caught. Our first time up against magic, Sammy, with all of our weapons cache back at O'Hare? We'd be caught so fast you wouldn't have time to realise you were doing a damn good impression of a dead guy. Other hand, we help everyone else, kill that son of a bitch, and we also save all of the people here. Course of action seems obvious."

"And morally ambiguous like always," Harry said tiredly. He could see Sam beginning to argue out of the corner of his eye and he said, "He's right. We're woefully outnumbered and inexperienced. Live to fight another day. All that rot." They'd reached the front of the line. "You have your passports, right?" Harry asked as he fished his out of his back pocket.

"Yeah," Sam said as Dean simply saluted with his.

"Alright then," Harry said, stepping up to the booth and smiling rakishly at the woman sat there. "Afternoon, ma'am," he said in an American accent that was far more authentic than his now natural American English hybrid, "Name's Sirius James, here for pleasure." He winked suggestively and slid his fake passport across the counter.

The woman didn't even look at it, far too busy gawking at Harry's forehead.

"Nasty thing, ain't it?" Harry said, trying not to blanch or start swearing. He winked again, trying desperately to make the woman notice that his eyes were blue and therefore he couldn't _possibly _be _that _Harry Potter - no, he didn't think it'd work, either, but then Muggle disguises left a lot to be desired. Harry had yet to find a Muggle concealer that could successfully hide his scar, and he just plain didn't look good in hats. "Got it working back on my Da's ranch. Learnt my lesson 'bout buckin' bronchos that day, let me tell you. Ain't nothing like a hoof to the brain pan to knock the stupid outta a thick skull like mine."

Still gawking, the woman's right hand slowly disappeared under the desk. Harry eyed it and the glass partition separating them with a rather jaundiced eye. To his surprise, no alarms immediately started blaring, and none of the wizards in the room started heading in his direction.

Instead, the woman simply stamped his passport with a shaking hand and then wordlessly waved him through to the other side of the booth. Harry moved over, letting Sam take his place at the glass partition.

Harry frowned, "Why do I get the feeling something bad's about to happen?"

* * *

"My Lord, we have confirmation."

"_Do _feel free to elucidate, Lucius," the Dark Lord Voldemort said darkly, artistically sprawled across the seat of an elaborate throne of carved rock. He tapped his yew and phoenix feather wand against his left knee to a rhythm that the Dark Lord could only hear in his own head. He lazily twirled it between his fingertips like an old west gunslinger as he tilted his chin towards Lucius Malfoy. The unspoken threat was clear. "My patience finds itself tested when the _hired help _thinks itself clever."

The shadowed man who knelt next to the smaller figure who had spoken earlier straightened slightly. "My Lord," he said, barely bound anticipation fairly dripping from each phoneme, "Harry Potter has been sighted."

Voldemort very nearly jerked upright, but stilled at the last minute instead, like a snake who suddenly found himself with his prey exactly where he wanted him. "Where?"

"Heathrow Airport, my Lord," Lucius said. "A Muggle transport station in Lond--"

"Do not patronise me, Lucius. I know what Heathrow is," Voldemort said. "And the Watch Tower?"

"Reported alarm activity on floor forty-two," Lucius confirmed, grey eyes gleaming. "Your troops await your orders. I, myself, am prepared to lead your forces in the capture of--"

"Yes," Voldemort cut Lucius off with a vague sweep of his wand. He shifted in his throne, bringing both feet to press against the stone dais that his throne was mounted upon, and leaned forwards. "Ready the Inner Circle. Forward the following: the boy is not to be harmed. I want him in one piece, the better for the breaking."

Lucius bowed his head, and then stood. With a swish of his robes, he turned and prepared to leave. His stride fast and long, he'd made it across half of the Dark Lord's throne room before being called again.

"Oh, and Lucius?"

Voldemort was on his feet when Lucius glanced back at him. "Yes, my Lord?"

The Dark Lord smirked. "Alert the troops as to my presence in the field."

* * *

"Maybe because you just jinxed it beyond all Hell?" Dean said.

Harry shot Dean an annoyed look in return as the taller man passed through passport control and joined him in waiting on the other side. "Really," Harry said, "how stupid of me. Here--I'll knock on wood…"

He'd just lifted his left hand to tap Dean upside the head - Dean already jerking away with the air of impending retaliation - when Sam stepped up behind his older brother and saved Harry the trouble.

"Oi!" Dean protested, rubbing his no doubt stinging scalp and twisting to face Sam. "What was that for?"

"You are such a two year old," Sam said with the sigh of the long suffering.

"_Me_?" Dean spluttered. "He started it."

"And I'm finishing it," Sam said. He tucked his passport into one of the inside pockets of his jacket and jerked his chin towards a sign that said 'baggage reclaim'. "C'mon. The sooner we get out of here, the happier I'll be."

That was a sentiment that Harry had to agree with. The walls were still lined with sentinel wizards who would occasionally break away to pounce on an unsuspecting victim or two, and it still set Harry on edge. He almost _wanted _to be noticed, if only so it would give him the opportunity to punch one of those bastard's in the kisser, but that would be more than foolhardy, and Dean had been right. Didn't mean Harry liked it.

Dean apparently didn't like it, either. Or maybe he just didn't like Harry. As Sam set off in the direction that the sign had indicated, and Harry and Dean fell in behind him, the elder Winchester glared. "Asshole," he said.

"Dickwad," Harry replied simply.

The dirty look he got in return only amplified as they reached the luggage carousel and Harry's bag trundled through the gap in the wall first. Smirking, Harry slung the duffel bag over one shoulder, and took stock of the enlarged room they were now in. There were fewer wizards present or, at least, fewer wizards blatantly waving their wizard-fu in other people's faces, but they were still there. The vast majority - an even dozen, maybe - were milling, weaving their way through the crowd, keeping an eye on things but not moving to do anything overtly threatening like grand theft kidnap. There were a few simply standing by the carousels, no doubt under the guise of assistance or of fellow, rather exotic passengers.

Something was…off. Harry couldn't put the feeling into words, but it was there, seeping into his bones and making his teeth ache.

Sam's bag swung into sight next, bobbing along behind a hot pink suitcase. Harry glanced around, searching for the root of the sensation. He vaguely heard Dean make some Barbie related crack at Sam, but Sam's response was a bit too low to make out as he hauled his bag off of the carousel and stood back to wait for Dean's.

Sam's bag hit the ground by his sneakered feet.

And all Hell broke loose.

"Viscus Expello!"

Harry was in motion before he could stop to think about it. He threw himself across the few feet separating him from his travel companions and torpedoed into Sam, his shoulder catching Sam in the stomach and forcing him back and down. Out of the corner of his eye, Harry saw Dean drop into a crouch and spin on his heel, jaw set as he searched out who had attacked them, fingers groping uselessly in the empty air that would once have held the butt of a fire arm.

It took a while for the Muggles to catch on and the screaming to start. Even then, once the first 'what the--?' had been said, and people started shifting away from the commotion, making double time to get to customs whether they had their luggage or not, it wasn't so much screaming as alarmed murmuring. In fact, the distinct lack of an appropriate response was far more worrisome than any panicked stampede or threat to call the police would have been. For a moment, Harry felt blindsided, and he stayed where he was, unable to move the length of his body from where it was pressing Sam down onto the linouleum floor. Then instinct and training kicked in.

"Shit," he said succinctly, pushing his weight up onto his elbows.

"What the Hell was that?" Dean demanded from somewhere close by. Harry rolled clear of Sam and scurried over to where Dean had holed up behind the low shelter of the luggage carousel, half-dragging the youngest Winchester along with him against the tide of slow-moving tourists. Halfway there, Sam finally managed to get his feet underneath him, and ran the rest of the way himself.

"Entrail-Expelling Curse," Harry said, dropping down next to Dean, and then shifting over as Sam joined them. "Does exactly what it says on the tin."

"Nice."

"Yeah. Not so much," Harry said. He glanced around, "Hit the wall over there, looks like." Said wall was scorched, like it had been torched by a flamethrower.

In the time it had taken Harry to pinpoint the spell's ultimate destination, the area had cleared of innocent bystanders, leaving only the three of them crouched behind the carousel, and, no doubt, whoever had fired at them in the first place.

Harry fell silent, ears straining for the barest of sounds beyond his own pounding heart beat and ragged breathing. When he could hear nothing but the squeak of his own jeans as he shifted, Harry very carefully froze, locking each individual muscle into place and then holding his breath. Even with no exhalation of air to distract him, and no brush of leather on denim to trick his ear, Harry couldn't hear so much as a murmur. He glanced at Sam, who shook his head, and then at Dean, who was frowning even before he noticed Harry's attention.

Left with no other choice, Harry swivelled in place until he was facing the carousel and his back was to open air. Then he slowly began to rise from his crouch, fingers locked over the lip of the carousel in order to ensure that he didn't lose his balance. He stopped the moment he could see over the carousel, locking his knees in place and blinking.

There were thirteen robed figures left on the floor, all of whom were looking in his direction. One raised their hand negligently and, with a careless swish, sent an angry coloured jet of light zooming his way. Cursing under his breath, Harry ducked, and the spell sped overhead, coming close enough to ruffle the bird's nest he called a hair style. He peeked back over the carousel just long enough to note that none of the figures had taken so much as a step forward, and then dropped back down next to Sam and Dean.

"Thirteen," he said, voice barely more than a hushed whisper. "Thirteen trigger happy little nutsos to our, er, ranged from our four o'clock to our eight o'clock." Harry paused to be a bit more specific, pointing through the carousel to where he could best remember the robed figures being. "As a matter of, hopefully, only academic interest, there's always been twelve in Voldemort's Inner Circle. Add the big bad himself…"

"And we're in for a world of hurt," Dean filled in.

"They're probably just peons," Harry said, unable to avoid sounding like he was trying to convince himself. "Opportunistic peons. I mean, the chances that--"

"Potty! Come out and pla-a-a-ay!"

Harry winced.

Sam caught it. "Don't tell me," he said, "world of hurt?"

If only they knew. "Bellatrix Lestrange," Harry said, "Voldemort's most faithful Death Eater. She's…" Harry blinked, "…dead, actually." He lifted his voice so that he could be clearly heard by even the furthest Death Eater and called, "Didn't I kill you?"

Bellatrix simply giggled.

"There's a lot of that going around, love," another, still familiar voice said with a throaty little purr. Though it had only been a couple of days since he'd heard the voice last, it took Harry a few seconds to place it.

That girl…sulphur…_demon_…

"Teleportation," Harry murmured, feeling a little sick at the thought.

Sam blinked. "_What_?"

On cue, the smell of rotten eggs assaulted his nostrils, and, in the space of a single blink, the girl was in front of him, cowl loose around her shoulders rather than over her head, and eyes locked, unerringly, on Harry.

"Hello, lover," she crooned. And pounced.

Harry had always been fast. First it had been something cultivated whilst fleeing from Dudley, his whale of a cousin. Then it had been something finely honed through Quidditch and his status as Hogwarts' youngest seeker in a century. After that, it had been a matter of survival, first because of Voldemort and the relentless speed with which the older wizard would cast curse after curse, then because he _chose _to put his life on the line, sometimes going mano a mano with the biggest, baddest, _fastest _supernatural nasties that bad luck could find.

He still barely got out of the way in time. Sam helped, grabbing a hold of his collar even as Harry threw himself left and bodily yanking Harry the last couple of extra inches. The demon hit the side of the carousel where Harry had previously been leaning with a loud clang and, as if that had been a cue, spells started flying.

"Shit!" Dean. Harry glanced back over his shoulder and tried not to cringe as his forced forward momentum turned the movement into whiplash. Dean was on his feet, shoulders ducking and weaving as he tried to stay clear of the barrage of spells being cast in their general direction. He'd obviously attempted to follow in Sam and Harry's wake, but had been foiled -- he was standing over the demon girl, a foot on either side of her ribcage, straining against the hold she had on his right ankle and trying hard not to go down. His left hand was delving deep in the inner reaches of his leather jacket, fingers groping as they--his hand was suddenly wrenched clear of the jacket, and Harry got what he'd been going for; an innocuous airline-brand packet of salt was clenched in Dean's fist.

As the older Hunter tore the packet open with his teeth, simultaneously trying to slam his captured foot into the demon girl's ribcage, Harry tore himself free of Sam's grasp and dove the couple of feet to his duffel bag, which had been flung clear in the commotion. Still shielded from Voldemort's forces by the carousel--though that could be blown up or vanished the very second one of the morons out there got a clue--Harry unzipped the duffel and quickly began rooting through it. His fingers closed around two plastic bottles of water and he yanked them out, tossing one at Sam, and keeping the second for himself.

"It's holy!" He said, twisting the cap free on his bottle and unceremoniously upending the contents into demon girl's face. Sam followed suit, and the girl screamed, an unnatural sound that made Harry's bones vibrate. Her skin cracked and peeled where the holy water had made contact, blistering and oozing with pus, burning and smoking as she writhed and kicked herself away, releasing Dean's ankle.

Too late.

"Confringo!"

Dean, still spitting more salt than he'd managed to get onto the demon, wouldn't see it coming in time. From his crouched position, Harry barely managed to make out the spell's trajectory…right at Dean's head.

Without thinking, Harry shrugged out of his leather jacket and swung it up into Dean's face. It caught there, shrouding Dean's head like he was some leatherhead version of a whacked out ghost. And the spell ricocheted; it hit Harry's jacket, and just bounced off, before striking a wall and being absorbed into the plaster. Dean tore the jacket off of his face, glared at it for a moment, and then hurled it back at Harry, dropping to his knees behind the relative safety of the carousel. Harry caught the jacket neatly and slipped it back on, even pausing to zip it up--it's protection worth far more than the few seconds it took to ensure it.

"What the Hell--?"

Harry cut Dean off with a shake of his head. "There are so many reasons that this isn't the time," he said, jerking his chin towards Sam.

Even with nothing but a plastic bottle of holy water and some bastard Latin in his arsenal, and even with the chaos going on around them--and the Death Eaters weren't advancing, why was that?--Sam had the writhing demon girl cornered, one hand tracing out the sign of the cross in the air above her. Sam's hand then dropped to press into the girl's forehead, his muscles having to strain as she attempted to buck him off and squirm free. Sam wasn't having any of it, though, and even Harry felt something uncomfortable thrum down his spine when the Hunter fiercely intoned, "Ab omni hoste visibili et invisibili et ubique in hoc saeculo liberetur!"

The girl, though still thrashing and cursing up a storm, suddenly seemed to calm somehow, like she'd just realised who she was. Accordingly, she wasted no time in blinking away, leaving behind the stench of sulphur and a puddle of holy water.

In the sudden absence of her screams, Harry thought he might have realised why the Death Eaters hadn't advanced upon them. Indeed, why the barrage of spells had eased off somewhat. He could hear his name…

"Harry! Harry, run for it!"

_What_?

Frowning, Harry stuck his head clear of the carousel again, and stared. What had been a relatively calm, empty space the last time he'd checked--all be it full of people jonesing to kill him--was now a raging battle. The thirteen cloaked figures had been challenged and met by half a dozen figures who were conspicuous simply because they weren't trying to hide anything. And, in one case, because of the bright red hair.

Harry watched for a moment longer and then dropped back down next to Dean and Sam. Red hair was good enough for him.

"We need to get out of here," he said, "the cavalry won't hold them long, not _without _Dumbledore and _with _the Dark Tosser."

Sam frowned. "But what _about _the cavalry? We can't just leave them here."

Harry shot him a look, annoyed that Sam thought he had the monopoly on caring for these people. "We _can't _do anything," he said. "That's why _they're _the cavalry and we're not. You find yourself a sawn-off shotgun or two from somewhere and I'll be right behind you kicking arse and taking names, but unless you _want _to try and drown them in half a litre of mineral water, we're skedaddling." Harry looked around, not waiting for consent. He couldn't see any other escape route other than the way they'd come in, and he didn't think passport control would yield many more ways out than off in an airplane. "Do you see anything? A loose air vent, an open window…hell, just a _window_?"

There was a moment of almost painful silence from his two companions, broken only by the roared incantations and yells from the other side of the luggage carousel. For such a seemingly stupid thing, it kept them away from the fire fight effectively enough, the little trundling treadmill still weighed heavy with unclaimed suitcases, and still going around and around and around. The fight on the other side seemed like a million miles away. He felt like he had all the time in the world.

Then Sam broke the silence with a grudging grunt, "What about over there?"

Harry looked. Harry blinked.

"It's a _wall_," Dean said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world and his brother was a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

"It's a wizarding zone!" Harry said suddenly, getting it. "Veiled from prying Muggle eyes. Great. It won't stop them following us, but there'll be a way out. Probably."

"Probably." Dean snorted. "That word always just makes my day."

"_Harry_!" The voice was more persistent now, tinged with just a little pain. Harry thought he was almost close to remembering which of the Weasley sons it belonged to. "Get your arse moving!"

"Alright," Dean said, "hold your damn horses."

The elder Hunter rocked up onto his heels and Harry copied his position, shifting over a bit to allow Sam the space to do similar. "Right," Harry said, "fast as we can, no looking back. Dean, grab hold of Sam before you go through--should stop you from going splat. I'll take rear, Sam takes point. Got that?"

Two reluctant nods met his words, Sam looking none too impressed to be leaving, Dean looking none too impressed to be having his well-being resting on 'probably's and 'should's.

"Right. _Go_!"

Harry fairly roared the last, pushing Sam and Dean forwards and then racing to keep on their heels. The Order wizards tried their hardest to stop any spells from getting through to them, but they were outnumbered and weakened, and more than one nasty hex splashed uselessly against Harry's jacketed back. Some sort of bludgeoning curse took out the carpeted flooring between Dean and Harry, and Harry had to leap over the smoking crater left behind.

"Go! Go! Go!" He urged, and Sam slipped beyond the wall, Dean's hand on his shoulder. Dean started to follow him less than a split second later, and Harry lunged, his fingertips barely catching Dean's coattails as he, too, was pulled through into the wizarding zone.

"Don't stop--keep going," Harry cried, still sprinting forwards as he burst into a large, gleaming marble room. The abandoned room was L-shaped, bent like a dog's hind leg. The far wall was covered in huge fireplaces. Just as Harry had hoped--a floo connection. "Get to one of the fireplaces!"

Sam made a beeline across the room, Dean on his heels and Harry right behind them, still ducking his head as the odd spell zinged past. They were travelling so fast that, even when they burst past the crook of the room's L-shape and had no impediments to their line of sight, they'd made it to the fireplace in the time it took their brains to notice the pale figure leaned against the wall and for the 'stop' command to make it to their legs.

Harry's heart froze in his chest.

"Sam…you'll need the powdery stuff in the ceramic jug on the mantel piece," he said plainly, stepping in front of the two brothers, and not removing his eyes from the masked figure. Red orbs stared back. He stepped a little closer, absently raising his hands up behind his head. "Get into the fireplace--you'll need to keep hold of Dean or it'll burn--and toss the powder down into the flame." He couldn't understand how he'd been so stupid. "I told you about a safe house during our story on the plane. You'll need to whisper the name, and clear out of there soon as. Got that?"

Sam swallowed. "Yeah…"

Harry nodded once. "Good," he said, and then threw himself at Lord Voldemort.

The taller wizard seemed surprised at such audacity, and Harry got an elbow into Voldemort's ribs and a fist into his eye before a vicious backhand caught him across the face and sent him stumbling backwards. Harry didn't go down. Instead, he flung himself back into the fray, his right leg scything about in a powerful flying roundhouse. Voldemort caught his ankle.

Harry blinked. Voldemort. _Caught_. His. Ankle.

"Holy shi--"

Voldemort smirked, and then _twisted_. His shoulders rolling, Voldemort spun around and slammed Harry into the wall as one would take a baseball bat to a piñata. Harry grunted, and hoped it was just his imagination that had heard that cracking sound.

"Petulant child," Voldemort said, voice hissing. "You have no idea how completely out of your depth you truly are."

For once, Harry felt too winded to let fly with a proper comeback. So instead he spat in Voldemort's face.

The Dark Lord's eyes widened in a fury that, had it been any other guy, would have been almost comical. Harry defiantly didn't gulp. Not even when Voldemort roared in pure, unadulterated anger and flung him across the room like he was nothing.

But Voldemort's aim was off; Harry didn't crash into the wall, or even into the mantle piece, which would have no doubt snapped his spine in half. Instead, he landed in Dean Winchester's outstretched arms, knocking the two of them to the ground inside the fireplace with a very mutual grunt. Sam, standing above them with a fierce expression on his face and one hand curved around Dean's neck, gutturally hissed the name of the safe house Harry had given him, and threw the floo powder into the raging flame about him.

The world collapsed in on itself, bleeding sickly greens and white hot flashes of light as it began to spin in place. The last sight Harry saw before being tossed into the floo network was Voldemort's face twisted in rage, and his wand raised as he snarled the two words that Harry hated more than anything.

"Avada Kedavra!"

Suddenly, someone very close by yelped in surprise, and Harry felt himself being spat out of a fireplace in a bundle of head-over-heel-over-arse grace. He landed on his head, and had to stay very still for a very long moment just to be sure that he wouldn't throw up. As he lay still, he listened, hearing nothing but nearby breathing, and his own heart rate. Alone, but for the Winchesters, then. Good. He cracked open a single eye halfway and blinked at the atrocious rug he was half-lying on. Definitely Grimmauld Place. Double good. He'd just lay there for a while, or a century or two, and get his bearings--

Two fists clenched around his collar and hauled him upright.

"Wha--?"

His back hit the wall hard enough to make it shower plaster, and his head snapped back a split second later with a crack that definitely _wasn't _in his imagination and, which made white lightening shoot through Harry's skull.

"Where is he?" The owner of the hands demanded, and Harry was more bemused than relieved that he recognised the voice.

"What?" Harry frowned, shaking his head to clear it, and reaching up to try and peel the fingers back away from his windpipe. He frowned up at Dean Winchester's heated glare, and sent his own back full-force. "I don't know what--"

"What did you do to him?" Dean snarled, apparently deciding to try a different track. He wrenched Harry forwards by his grip on his throat, only to ram him back into the wall a second time. "What did you do to Sam?"

Sam? Harry blinked again, and peered past Dean's shoulder…to a room that definitely didn't have Sam in it. His mind flashed back over the last couple of minutes, helplessly trying to make sense of…

"Shit," Harry said.

And Dean Winchester's fist collided with his face.


End file.
